TELEVISION THEORY 27

TELEVISION THEORY 27

triumph of industrialized cultural production. The two approaches continue to be linked via political economy’s distaste for what is still often regarded as mass culture (Adorno and Horkeimer 1977; Garnham 1987). Conflicts to do with labor and interpretation are forgotten in favor of a pessimistic, top- down, leftist functionalism.

For Television Studies 2.0, by contrast, TV represents the apex of modernity, the first moment in history when central political and commercial organs and agendas became receptive to the popular classes. This perspective has offered a way in to research that reverses Television Studies 1.0’s faith in the all- powerful agency of the apparatus. For, in TV Studies 2.0, the all- powerful agent is the television audience, not the industry. TV Studies 2.0 claims that the public is so clever and able that it makes its own meanings, outwitting institutions of the state, academia, and capit- alism that seek to measure and control it. In the case of children and the media, anxieties from Television Studies 1.0 about turning Edenic innocents into rabid monsters or capitalist dupes are dis- missed. TV supposedly obliterates geography, sovereignty, and hierarchy in an alchemy of truth and beauty, as per Houghland and Arnheim’s 1935 hopes. The “interstellar death ray” and the nefari- ous, manipulative designs of governments and firms have failed. Today’s deregulated, individuated world of television allegedly makes consumers into producers, frees the disabled from confine- ment, encourages new subjectivities, rewards intellect and com- petitiveness, links people across cultures, and allows billions of flowers to bloom in a post- political cornucopia. It’s a kind of Marxist/Godardian wet dream, where people fish, film, fuck, frolic, and fund from morning to midnight. Sometimes, faith in the active audience reaches cosmic proportions. It has been a donnée of TV Studies 2.0 that television is not responsible for – well, any-

thing. Consumption is the key – with production discounted, labor forgotten, consumers sovereign, and research undertaken by observing one’s own practices of viewing and one’s friends and children. This is narcissography at work, with the critic’s persona a guarantor of assumed audience resistance and Dionysian revelry

(Morris 1990). 1 New technology even sees some adherents of TV Studies 1.0 resigning from their former lives and signing up to join

2.0 due to their investment in a revised televisual sublime. Jean- Louis Missika argues that the classic era of television was a period

28 TELEVISION STUDIES: THE BASICS of absolute domination by producers, editors, and schedulers over

audiences, but it has been superseded by the freedoms of new tech- nology (Cristiani and Missika 2007). His fellow- cybertarian Vincent Cerf, one of the seemingly limitless white men jostling to claim authorship of the Internet while boasting that no- one owns it, claims that TVs are becoming iPods – downloading devices subject to audience mastery (Martin 2007).

This strand of research, which lies at the core of Television Studies 2.0, is a very specific uptake of venerable and profound UK critiques of cultural pessimism, political economy, and current- affairs-oriented broadcasting. These critiques originated from a heavily regulated, duopolistic broadcasting system – 1950s–1970s Britain – in which the BBC represented a high- culture snobbery that many leftists associated with an oppressive class structure. Hence the desire for a playful, commercial, anti- citizen address as a counter. When this type of TV made its Atlantic crossing to the US, there was no public- broadcasting behemoth in need of cri- tique – more a squibby amoeba “financially suspended in a vegeta- tive state” (Chakravartty and Sarikakis 2006: 85). And there were lots of not- very-leftist professors and students seemingly aching to hear that US audiences learning about parts of the world that their country bombs, invades, owns, misrepresents, or otherwise exploits was less important, and less political, than those audiences’ inter- pretations of actually existing soap operas, wrestling bouts, or science- fiction series. When a group of Yanqui Television Studies

2.0 scholars intervened in policy, it was to support video- game industrialists in a law case against a commercial ordinance that required manufacturers to advise parents that their products were risky for young people (“Brief” 2003; see Kline 2003).

Greg Dyke and David Putnam, famous British media executives,

are highly unusual in boosting media studies as good for both cit- izenship and professional awareness (Burrell 2008; Beckett 2004), although Ofcom (2008b) has a Media Literacy E- Bulletin, amongst other initiatives. This is not surprising, because despite their com- plicity with many dominant ideas from neoclassical economics and the psy- function, TV Studies 1.0 and 2.0 are frequently associated with the more critical, textual, political–economic and ethno- graphic side of my summary. This alternative tradition attracts intense opprobrium. So Robert W. McChesney laments that the